Mitsuye Yamada
Mitsuye Yamada is a significant Japanese American writer born on July 5, 1923, in Fukuoka, Japan, who moved to the United States at a young age. She grew up in Seattle, Washington, but her life took a dramatic turn during World War II when her family was subjected to internment, an experience that profoundly influenced her writing. Yamada's most notable work, "Camp Notes and Other Poems," reflects her internment experience and addresses themes of human rights, identity, and resilience. She pursued higher education, earning degrees in English and literature, and had a successful teaching career at community colleges in California.
Yamada is also an activist, having worked with Amnesty International and serving on its national board, advocating for human rights and increased Asian involvement in these efforts. Her second poetry collection, "Desert Run," explores themes of alienation and healing against the backdrop of the desert's beauty. In addition to her literary contributions, she co-founded the MultiCultural Women Writers group to support diversity in the arts. Yamada's work has established her as a crucial voice in articulating Japanese American identity, and her recent collection, "Full Circle: New and Selected Poems," showcases her enduring impact on literature.
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Subject Terms
Mitsuye Yamada
- Born: July 5, 1923
- Birthplace: Fukuoka, Kyushu, Japan
Author Profile
Japanese American writer Mitsuye Yasutake Yamada was born in Fukuoka, Kyushu, Japan, on July 5, 1923, but moved with her family to the United States when she was three. She spent most of her formative years in Seattle, Washington, until a few months after the outbreak of World War II, when her father was arrested as an enemy alien, and the rest of the family was removed to internment camps in Puyallup, Washington, and Minidoka, Idaho. Yamada's poems in Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976), her best-known work, recount this experience. Her need to integrate her art, her beliefs, and her commitment to human rights stems largely from the impact this event had on her.
After leaving the camps, Yamada attended the University of Cincinnati before earning a bachelor’s degree in English and art at New York University and a master’s degree in literature at the University of Chicago. She married Yoshikazu Yamada in 1950 and finally became a naturalized US citizen in 1955. She had a distinguished career as a teacher, working for many years at a community college in Cypress, California, and serving as writer-in-residence at Pitzer College and San Diego State University.
In her writings, Yamada has characteristically focused on her bicultural heritage, women, and human rights. Camp Notes became an important work in the tradition of depicting Japanese American internment in literature. During the early 1960s, Yamada began working as a volunteer with Amnesty International, and her continuing commitment to human rights through that organization eventually led to her service on the national board of Amnesty International USA and participation in international committees seeking increased Asian involvement in human rights work. She made several trips to South Korea, Japan, and other countries in Asia on behalf of Amnesty International.
Commitment to diversity in all areas of life led Yamada to multidisciplinary as well as multicultural commitments. While a community college professor, she team-taught an interdisciplinary course in biology and poetry, which involved field trips to research and experience the wilderness areas of California. Out of this experience came many of the poems and stories in Yamada’s second solo collection, Desert Run (1988). This book returns to the themes of alienation, human rights, and protest against injustice that reverberate through the earlier collection. In Desert Run, seeing the desert from a new perspective enables a healing process to take place. The title poem, “Desert Run,” makes the comparison explicitly as the speaker returns in memory to the earlier, enforced relocation of Japanese Americans in the desert, where armed guards stood watch over American men, women, and children, and contrasts it with the silence, agelessness, and demanding beauty of the desert as seen on a class camping trip. Other poems celebrate the beauty of seemingly insignificant flowers and, especially, the strength and endurance of desert plants such as cacti and lichens.
Another avenue of Yamada’s activism is her formation of a writers’ group, MultiCultural Women Writers. This loosely formed association works to raise support and awareness of diversity in the arts and published an anthology, Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multi-Cultural Women (1990), coedited by Yamada, which has gone through several editions. In 2003, Yamada contributed to the volume, Three Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism. In 2019, well into her nineties, Yamada published Full Circle: New and Selected Poems. The collection represented the culmination of Yamada's prolific and impactful career. Yamada is seen as an important voice in the expression of Japanese American identity in literature.
Bibliography
Cheng, Scarlet. “Foreign All Your Life.” Belles Lettres, vol. 4, no. 2, 1989.
Hong, Jane. “Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake.” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 92, no. 4, fall 2023, pp. 658–59, EBSCOhost, doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.4.658. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
Jaskoski, Helen. “A MELUS Interview: Mitsuye Yamada.” MELUS, vol. 15, no. 1, 1988, pp. 97–108.
Patterson, Anita Haya. “Resistance to Images of the Internment: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes.” MELUS, vol. 23, no. 3, 1998.
“Poet Yamada to Launch New Book with Program Featuring Intergenerational JA Writers.” Rafu Shimpo, 17 Aug. 2019, https://rafu.com/2019/08/poet-yamada-to-launch-new-book-with-program-featuring-intergenerational-ja-writers/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
Schweik, Susan. “A Needle with Mama’s Voice: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and the American Canon of War Poetry.” Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited by Helen M. Cooper, et al., U of North Carolina P, 1989.
Woolley, Lisa. “Racial and Ethnic Semiosis in Mitsuye Yamada’s ‘Mrs. Higashi Is Dead.’” MELUS, vol. 24, no. 4, 1999.
Yamada, Mitsuye. “A MELUS Interview: Mitsuye Yamada.” Interview by Helen Jaskoski. MELUS, vol. 15, no. 1, 1988.
Yamada, Mitsuye, and Sarie Sachie Hylkema, editors. Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multi-Cultural Women. MultiCultural Women Writers, 1991.